Dan Haar: Inspired by Stop & Shop, she’s steel-willed

Wanda Howard, president of United Steelworkers Local 12160, is a senior customer service representative at the South Central Regional Water Authority in New Haven, where 126 employees have been working under an expired contract for a year.

Wanda Howard, president of United Steelworkers Local 12160, is a senior customer service representative at the South Central Regional Water Authority in New Haven, where 126 employees have been working under an

Wanda Howard, president of United Steelworkers Local 12160, is a senior customer service representative at the South Central Regional Water Authority in New Haven, where 126 employees have been working under an expired contract for a year.

Wanda Howard, president of United Steelworkers Local 12160, is a senior customer service representative at the South Central Regional Water Authority in New Haven, where 126 employees have been working under an

The Stop & Shop strike has special meaning for Wanda Howard. She’s a senior customer service rep at the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority in New Haven who’s spent more than a year fighting for a contract for her and her fellow workers.

Her father is a retired Stop & Shop truck driver with the Teamsters union in North Haven, and now she’s president of United Steelworkers Local 12160, which represents 126 water authority employees.

In her Westville neighborhood in New Haven, she buys groceries at the Amity Stop & Shop and knows many of the workers — including Skip Robinson, the charismatic fish guy I wrote about last week on the picket line.

Naturally, Howard walked the picket line with her brethren and sisteren, and she greeted Richard Trumka, the national AFL-CIO president who came to the New Haven store April 17.

A lot, as it turns out. They’re heading into arbitration soon after failing to reach a deal to replace a contract that expired in April, 2018.

“If the Stop & Shop strike hadn’t happened, maybe we would have felt like we needed to give in to the authority’s demands,” Howard told me Wednesday. “They encouraged us to feel like we would win.”

Because of the strike, in which the 31,000 United Food and Commercial Workers union members kept most of the health, retirement and premium pay benefits they wanted (after they vote Thursday), Howard added, “We will be empowered to stand up for more or hold out for more...It strengthens us at the table.”

That’s strong stuff coming from the leader of a union that has already had a couple of informational pickets — they’re classified as public employees, and therefore can’t strike — with another rally scheduled for Thursday in New Haven.

Very strong stuff. Is it really true? Can the Stop & Shop walkout inspire and propel workers to exert muscle and win?

“These are propitious times in the labor movement for renewed activity,” said Jonathan Cutler, a sociology professor and expert on organized labor at Wesleyan University in Middletown. “It’s ready to go. You just have to have the spark of essentially a level of confidence.”

But Cutler added, “You’ve got to have a labor movement that either is willing to take a bold step in favor of its membership or organize new members.”

‘It’s enough already’

Unemployment in the state and the nation is under 4 percent, giving workers more leverage as employers strain to find good people. Wages, while generally up over the last three years, have not risen as much as overall national income, and raises have totaled less for moderately paid people than we might expect in an extended economic boom.

“If you’re not going to act now, then when on Earth were you planning to exercise leverage as a labor movement?” Cutler asks.

Indeed, data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows 20 mass strikes or work stoppages in 2018 — walkouts involving 1,000 or more people — by 485,000 workers, the most since 1986. The number of days idle in the major strikes, 2.8 million, was the most since 2004.

Walkout activity remains far below the strike heydays of the ‘50s, then the early ‘70s, but the strike spike of 2018 — which apparently continues into 2019 — could mark the first sustained increase since union membership began its long, steady decline in the early ‘80s. Former President Ronald Reagan set the tone by breaking the air traffic controllers union in 1981.

Unionists say yes, this is the start of something big, not just from Stop & Shop but also the teachers that gained widespread public support in Los Angeles, Oklahoma and West Virginia, among other actions.

“It is extremely important not to just say we will see more strikes because we will see more strikes,” said David Pickus, who retired this year as president of SEIU Healthcare 1199NE, the state’s largest health care workers union. “Workers have been thwarted for God knows how many years…and the rich keep getting richer and richer.”

About 2,500 SEIU 1199 nursing home workers could strike in the coming days if the state doesn’t come up with more money for Medicaid reimbursement, in another local sign of muscle.

“It’s enough already,” Pickus said.

Ah, anger. It’s a real factor when it’s grassroots-genuine, and President Donald Trump is seeing to that. He’s been called the greatest union organizer ever. Last week’s tax deadline brought a national realization for millions that, wait a minute, there was no real tax cut for me in the 2017 tax “reform.”

And the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision last June, cheered by Trump, allowing unionized public employees to stop paying dues if they so choose, may have backfired. State and municipal employees have not only stayed on the dues-paying rolls, they’ve shown renewed vigor for fighting in places such as Connecticut.

Bucking the national trend, Connecticut union membership, public and private sector combined, rose by more than 25 percent to 268,000 between 2013 and 2018. And a Gallup poll last summer showed a 15-year high in approval of unions, at 62 percent, holding steady for as second year.

Many barriers, no guarantees

Despite all this, there is nothing remotely close to an assurance that Howard and other organized workers will realize gains. The Stop & Shop walkout worked in large part, Cutler said, because customers were able to feel good about supporting workers they saw regularly, without much inconvenience — as other supermarkets filled the void.

It’s ironic, Cutler pointed out, that one private report by Skyhook showed the grocery chain that benefited the most — Hannaford Supermarkets, in Massachusetts and Northern New England — is a mostly nonunion company owned by the same Dutch parent as Stop & Shop, Ahold Delhaize.

Will workers such as Howard at the water authority — not a beloved group the way meat and deli clerks are — feel the same love, and hold the same power? Maybe yes, maybe no. Details matter.

Worker gains will fall short, Cutler suggested, if unions don’t succeed in organizing more workers. Yes, the Stop & Shop strike met its goals. But one of the best payers in the industry was made to suffer because it tried to bring its costs in line with non-organized competitors such as Whole Foods and Aldi.

“You can only go on so long with one player organized and leave the rest of the field unorganized,” Cutler said. “This was a field day for all the nonunion stores.”

Unions also face what I’d call an equilibrium problem, as pro-union, higher wage states in the Northeast and west coast see slower growth and fiscal crises with regional economies less able to support pay gains in the long run — nowhere more than in Connecticut.

If workers do succeed, employers will counter with technology upgrades to replace them, as has happened throughout history. Stop & Shop’s use of a robot to clean floors and auto-checkout machines was a factor in the strike. And Howard said the water authority recently installed automated meter readers, which will lead to job losses.

And of course, if the economy turns downward, as many predict as soon as next year, “The moment will have passed,” Cutler said.

Howard credits unions with her own middle-class upbringing in East Haven and her ability to raise her daughter, now a 38-year-old nurse, as a single parent. “I took pride in knowing that I didn’t have to subsidize anything with Section 8 or welfare,” she said.

She takes the long-term, global view of the Stop & Shop strike as an inspiration.

“Their struggle was our struggle, their win was our win, their support they received is the same support that we receive,” she said. “I’d just like to see other people have that opportunity when I’m gone.”